VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

Study: Educated older people still get most of their news from television — The “educated” demographic, 23 percent of the U.S. population, also gets news online, according to a buzzword-laden report by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. This demographic is called “Integrators,” according to the language of Pew, and is somewhat similar in behavior to the younger, smaller group of online-focused readers it calls “Net-Newsers.”

Hewlett-Packard had a strong second quarter, beating analysts’ estimates — HP reported its summer quarter ended July 31 hit $28 billion in revenues, up 10 percent from a year earlier and above analysts expectations of $27.4 billion. Profits were also better than expected. Strong segments included server blades, storage, software and notebooks.

Free rides for all on the Red Line? — Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students are now able to publish their findings on how to hack into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (Boston) subway card service. They’d received a 10-day gag order last week, preventing them from disclosing their newfound free-ride knowledge at the Defcon hacker conference (that didn’t stop the info from spreading over the Internet, anyway).

Social network application company RockYou is considering at running classified ads in its car-related applications — This is another way for it to make money. Silicon Alley Insider has a few more details.

News aggregator NewsCred launches new features — Those include more advanced search, and pages for particular topics and breaking news.

Game industry trade group hires recording industry anti-piracy lawyer — The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has hired Kenneth Doroshow, a former executive at the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA is notorious for its efforts to combat those who illegally copy music and just shut down the music sharing site Muxtape. This is not going to make the ESA better friends with, well, anyone in their 20s and below.

Study: Big-media video site Hulu still growing quickly, passes Turner and CNN online — Now, Hulu is number eight Nielsen’s ranking of the top 10 video sites. It generated more than 105 million streams in July, to more than 3.2 million unique viewers. NewTeeVee has more.

Another travel-planning site launches: TravelMob — Allen Stern at CenterNetworks has tried it out for himself and seems to like it.

YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim now an investor, in Minnesota — Karim, a computer science Ph.D student at Stanford, is spending his summer break scouting out the twin cities for early-stage investments, the Star-Tribune reports in an interview. Youniversity Ventures, the investing body he’s a part of, originally planned to focus on just students coming out of Stanford and the University of Illinois — apparently, the scope is broadening. From the article:

…Whereas here [in the twin cities], there is certainly less activity. But at the same time, you don’t have these bubbles of nonsense out here. Things here seem a little too formal. I think that it’s inhibiting productivity. People in Silicon Valley will just get together and shoot around some ideas or program something together. Here, we have to go to a specific conference to meet people.

[MBTA Red Line ticket machine photo via James X. Nguyen. And yes, the Red Line is the one that goes by MIT.]

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are each worth about $326 million as a result of Google’s purchase of the video-sharing company, documents registered by Google Wednesday reveal.

Their takes are five times that of third co-founder Jawed Karim, who returned to Stanford before YouTube was bought last year. Karim got 137,443 shares, worth about $65 million based on the $470 closing price of Google’s stock yesterday. Hurley and Chen both have 694,087 shares.

For the full, long list of beneficiaries, check out the Securities and Exchange Commission document directly (see pages 5-16). Only a partial list is below in screenshot.

Venture firm Sequoia Capital, the main early backer of YouTube, got more than a million shares, or more than $502 million based on Google’s current stock price. Most of that, however, was transferred to Sequoia’s investors. The SEC link above provides a good look at who they are. Artis Capital, a hedge fund with ties to Sequoia, got about 176,500 shares, now valued at about $83 million. The other big indirect YouTube beneficiary we hadn’t known about before was the Ford Foundation (an investor in Sequoia). It carries 218,989 shares, valued at $103 million.

Finally, YouTube senior software engineer Yu Pan did well, with 75,593 shares, or about $36 million.

End-of-week roundup in Silicon Valley:

The YouTube jig, and lecture — Here’s a link to a lecture that Jawed Karim, the co-founder of video-sharing site YouTube gave this week. It is a history how YouTube got to where it did. GigaOm has a good summary.

The site’s founders suffered at first; they couldn’t get pretty girls to post videos, despite offering payment. But the site’s three co-founders hit the winning recipe in June 2005, Karim explains, when they added four features that instigated viral growth: 1) related video recommendations, 2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video, 3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments, and 4) an external video player.

Speaking of Karim, we’ve just recognized him in a quirky video we’d seen last year and never quite forgotten. Remember the popular Matt’s Dancing video? Well, while scrolling through its related videos last year, we found a link to the video above (click on the image) of a guy at Stanford doing a silly imitation of Matt’s dance. Turns out, it was Karim.

Meanwhile, YouTube gets a facelift — Pete Cashmore has the details here. He also has a good analysis of how to game YouTube. He submitted a mediocre video, and auto refreshed it all Sunday night, which pushed the video to the third “most viewed” page and tenth in the “comedy” category. We’re hearing more about such schemes, and it raises questions about the authenticity YouTube’s stated traffic numbers. Users are realizing that unless they click on their video a thousand times, it will never get to the top of the pile. Professional marketers are getting involved, and spamming the system. We’ll have more on this next week.

iLike launches its music taste-matching service — We mentioned its plans to do so, after it raised $2.5 million, and how awfully similar its brand seemed to Apple’s (iLike’s parent company is GarageBand, which is a site for independent movie artists; GarageBand is also the name of an Apple recording site)

Anyway, iLike is designed for iTunes and iPod users, and its service offers them a bunch of features, including 1) a list of the music your friends are listening to that you don’t have, 2) personalized recommendations of free MP3 downloads from almost 200,000 independent artists, and 3) a iLike “SideBar,” which gives you a buddy list for discovering music through friends.

iLike displays a rating to show how similar your tastes are to other users, and lets you connect to them. You can post an iLike widget to blogs and sites like MySpace, hi5, Piczo and Live Spaces.

It is backed by Khosla Ventures and former AOL Time Warner executive Bob Pittman.

Veeker launches away to post video to any site while on the go — The stealthy Veeker has finally launched, and its essentially instant video messaging from the road — with a way to embed your video in any website. Mobilecrunch has the story . Veeker uses something called Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which is the multimedia form of texting. Mobilecrunch summarizes:

The most basic use case is to shoot 60 seconds of video from your mobile phone and upload this video to Veeker in the form of an MMS. Within about 60 seconds your video is on the Veeker portal where, depending upon whether you sent it to one of three addresses is visible only by you (me@veeker.com) visible to you and your contacts (v@veeker.com) or made available for viewing by anyone who visits Veeker and is inclined to check you out (world@veeker.com).

You can embed a Veeker player at your site, which shows the videos you’re sending Veeker from the road. You can also pull into your player the videos send by your Veeker friends.

It appears to have an edge in simplicity. Unlike Shozu and Mywaves
it doesn’t require any downloads or registration. The question is whether the MMS format will catch on with users. Veeker execs cite statistics reported by Verizon and Cingular, which show second quarter usage of MMS growing 26 percent over the first quarter. Factor in Sprint and T-Mobile traffic, and the quarter saw a billion MMS messages

Veeker’s chief executive is Alex Kelly, former head of corporate development for Pinnacle Systems, which was sold to Avid Technologies for $462 Million.

Now that Google has snapped up hot video site YouTube, everyone is piling on Yahoo, which is supposed to be Google’s competitor.

They’re criticizing Yahoo for being too slow. The NYT cites an advertiser saying clients are taking out fewer ads on Yahoo, preferring hipper sites like MySpace. There’s the WSJ, saying Yahoo’s negotiations to buy college social networking company Facebook (as previously reported) aren’t going anywhere, and that it has fewer reserves than Google to pull off these acquisitions. Its stock price has fallen, making it poor. Even one of Yahoo’s biggest fans, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, has sold off his Yahoo stock. In recent months, Wilson had championed Yahoo on his blog, in part because it had bought Del.icio.us, a company he’d invested in.

Click on image here to take you to a list of the most recent Internet acquisitions. Google is well represented.

VentureWire (sub required) has a good discussion of valuations: Google paid about $23 per YouTube unique visitor, 10 cents per trailing 12-month page views and 10 cents per trailing 12-month minutes of use. In comparison, Google trades at 14 cents per trailing 12-month page views and 37 cents per trailing 12-month minutes of use.

Finally, the NYT’s Miguel Helft has a good anecdote about YouTube’s oft-forgotten third founder, Jawed Karim, who went off to study at Stanford, relinquishing some of his riches at YouTube, and even Stanford professors couldn’t seem to understand why. The fun part was when Karim took Helft back to his pad and showed him a video of co-founder Steven Chen complaining — as recently as April of last year — that YouTube’s had a mere 50 videos.